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z
Odd Man Out
Sat 8 Jun 12:30 PM DOQ3
UK | 1947 | 116 mins | In English
Director, Producer: Carol Reed | Screenwriters: F.L .Green, R.C .Sherriff | Cast:
James Mason, Robert Newton, Cyril Cusack | Print Source and Rights:
Park Circus
In the dark hours after a violent Belfast robbery attempt
goes wrong, IRA gunman McQueen (James Mason) tests
the loyalty of friends, the kindness of strangers and his
wounded belief in the Irish Republican cause. This was
Carol Reed’s first collaboration with the Australian-raised
cinematographer Robert Krasker, with whom he would
soon make The Third Man. As in all Reed’s films,
storytelling is allegorical and gothic. But the work of source
novelist F. L. Green was always brooding with cosmic
judgment and the acid of human kindness. As McQueen
crosses paths with the fears, desires and shabby morals of
the gallery of supporting characters, the film weighs, tests
and finds his character wanting. The lesson is richly
illustrated through Krasker’s camerawork, sometimes
making the point through angular expressionist framing
that visually miniaturises Mason’s character, ruthlessly
cutting him ‘down to size’.
they Made Me a Fugitive
aKa I Became a crImInal
Sat 8 Jun 3:00 PM DOQ3
UK|1947|95mins|InEnglish
Director: Alberto Cavalcanti | Screenwriter: Noel Langley | Producer: N.A.
Bronsten | Cast: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard, Griffith Jones | Print Source and
Rights: British Film Institute
‘Narcy’ Narcissus is “...cheap, rotten, after-the-war trash.”
So he needs brains, social skills and respectability as his
black-market operation grows. Bored Battle of Britain hero
Clem (Trevor Howard) at first does nicely; he needs the
money, wants to keep vain girlfriend Ellen interested and
also misses the old thrills of wartime. He comes to his
senses when the operation shifts from consumer goods to
hard drugs; but bailing out of this game proves much
harder than getting out of a Spitfire, especially when Narcy
fits Clem up for the killing of a copper. Brazilian director
Alberto Cavalcanti had an eclectic but fascinating career in
UK cinema, making everything from experimental Crown
Film Unit documentaries, through Dickens adaptations to
gothic horror. Least expected would be this entry in the
‘spiv’ sub-cycle of late 1940s British noir.
it always Rains On sunday
Sun 9 Jun 1:00 PM aGnSW
UK|1947|92mins|InEnglish
Director: Robert Hamer | Screenwriters: Angus Macphail, Robert Hamer,
Henry Cornelius | Producer: Michael Balcon | Cast: Googie Withers,
Jack Warner, John McCallum | Print source: British Film Institute | Rights:
Tamasa Distribution
It’s one dreary early Sunday morning in London’s Bethnal
Green, early in 1947 but at the height of Britain’s post-war
gloom. Before her husband and stepdaughters are awake,
unhappily married housewife Rose finds her old wartime
lover Tommy on her doorstep – on the run from jail and a
long prison term for robbery. She hides him in the old
air-raid shelter and gets on with the Sunday chores. But
Tommy wants to make up for lost time and for the
remaining slow Sunday hours he will be for Rose an
alluring, dangerous reminder of the thrills of her past life.
This is the masterpiece of the troubled career of director
Robert Hamer, and a great double role for two of Hamer’s
regular acting collaborators – Australian John McCallum
and Australian-by adoption Googie Withers, perhaps doing
their best work in UK studio cinema. Screening introduced
by members of John McCallum and Googie Withers’ family.
Screens with What a Life! and The People at No. 19
nOOse
aKa The SIlk nooSe
Sun 9 Jun 10:30 aM aGnSW
UK|1948|95mins|InEnglish
Director: Edmond T. Gréville | Screenwriters: Edward Dryhurst, Richard
Llewellyn | Producer: Edward Dryhurst | Cast: Carole Landis, Derek Farr,
Joseph Calleia | Print source: British Film Institute | Rights: Renown Films
Black-market racketeer Sugiani is amassing vast fortunes
and a fine-art collection of questionable taste. Then an
American fashion reporter in London learns about his habit
of beating up young women. Linda Medbury decides to
wages a crusade against him and all Soho spivs just like
him, enlisting to her side a strike force of cockney boxers.
With Warner Bros. money, and the Anglo-American ‘special
relationship’ in play, Hollywood’s Carole Landis and Joseph
Calleia are the official stars. Both do their bit: Landis (who
sadly killed herself just before the film’s release) as the
feisty, wasted light comic talent that she always was;
Calleia by enjoying a chance to satirise his real-life Maltese
origins to an audience who got the joke (“I’m a British...
foreign national...”). It’s very best parts certainly feel more
‘30s gay than late-’40s gloom.
Screens with The Dark Stairway
day bReak
MOn 10 Jun 12:45 PM aGnSW
UK|1948|81mins|InEnglish
Director: Compton Bennett | Screenwriter: Sydney Box. Muriel Box |
Producer: Sydney Box | Cast: Ann Todd, Eric Portman, Maxwell Reed |
Print source: British Film Institute | Rights: Park Circus
Hangman Eddie Mendover’s last job is a young Norwegian
sailor, Olaf Tyson. But the condemned man recoils more
at Eddie’s appearance than at the sight of the noose.
Shattered, Mendover admits he knows the reason for
Olaf’s terror: he recognised his executioner as the man he
thought he’d murdered. Of all British noir’s frequent
variations on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings
Twice, this is the most achingly poignant. Daybreak upsets
the usual moral role play of the noir fable. Here, instead,
husband and wife are tender but too-late lovers,
sympathetic victims of past mistakes, bad luck and an
inner confusion between their good natures and deepest
anxieties. The film’s commercial potential dissolved when
censorship problems delayed its release for two years.
Yet in a sense the censors understood the potency of the
material better than its producers.
Screens with Cine Gazette No. 12:
The Elephant Will Never Forget
yield tO the night
aKa Blonde SInner
Sun 16 Jun 10:30 aM aGnSW
UK|1956|99mins|InEnglish
Director: J. Lee Thompson | Screenwriters: John Cresswell, Joan Henry |
Producer: Kenneth Harper | Cast: Diana Dors, Yvonne Mitchell, Michael Craig
| Print source: British Film Institute | Rights: Studio Canal/Tamasa Distribution
Perfume-counter blonde Mary Hilton guns down a
fashionable London socialite. Why comes out at Hilton’s
trial: she’d left her husband for a more exciting life with a
nightclub pianist (Michael Craig) – only to rage with erotic
and class envy when he tosses her aside for a wealthier
mistress. The British legal system won’t tolerate Hilton’s
desire – but can’t grasp that even the utter terror of dying
won’t teach her to be ‘good’. Putting Diana Dors on Death
Row in 1956 linked one tabloid topic then titillating British
public opinion – star Dors’ private life – to another that
made it deeply uneasy: 1955’s hanging of ex-starlet Ruth
Ellis. Empathetic ‘woman’s melodrama’ specialist director
J. Lee Thompson rubs the gloss off (in Dors’ case it was
literally, proving a brave willingness to play plain, plump
and dreadfully frightened), revealing a sadness within both
celebrity personalities.
Screens with Nice Time
the siege OF Pinchgut
Sat 8 Jun 10:30 aM DOQ3
UK, Australia | 1957 | 98 mins | In English
Director: Harry Watt | Screenwriters: Harry Watt, Jon Cleary | Producer:
Michael Balcon | Cast: Aldo Ray, Heather Sears, Neil McCallum| Print Source:
Canal+ | World Sales: Tamasa Distribution
Ned Kelly-like bank robber Matt Kirk (Aldo Ray) plans a
prison escape in order to clear his name. Things go wrong
and Kirk, his young idealising brother Johnny and
accomplices are trapped on Sydney Harbour’s Pinchgut
Island. Their only way out becomes an apocalyptic plan to
blackmail the New South Wales government. A favourite of
Quentin Tarantino’s, this is the least-known of the films
Ealing Studios made in Australia (in fact the last Ealing
made before the studio closed for good). The original script
was conceived in the 1940s, by Commonwealth Film Unit
employees Lee Robinson and Inman Hunter, with Nazi spies
in mind. Arguably the only genuine Oz-noir ever made, it’s
also unusual for its contemporary urban setting and hints
at an Australian ugliness, cynicism and authoritarianism
from which the Kirks feel the need to flee.
hell dRiveRs
MOn 10 Jun 10:30 aM aGnSW
UK|1957|92mins|InEnglish
Director: Cy Endfield | Screenwriters: John Kruse, Cy Endfield | Producer:
Benjamin Fisz | Cast: Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins| Print
source: British Film Institute | Rights: Park Circus
After doing a year in jail for an accident that crippled his
brother, Joe ‘Tom’ Yateley is only good for a piece-work job
driving ballast trucks for haulage contractor Hawlett’s.
Manager Cartley runs a ‘just in time’ business, with their
drivers on dangerous deadlines, taking all the risks and
expected to kick back some of the rewards. The workplace
is speed-tribal: wildcat, risk addicted, alpha male and
dominated by Red (Patrick McGoohan), the fastest driver
and biggest bully. Accidents are bound to happen...
American director Cy Endfield was another UK refugee
from the Hollywood blacklist. He’s best-known today for
1964’s Zulu, but Hell Drivers has become his cult film. And
what better go-to cast of Brit- (and Euro-) trash character
actors to speed him there, including Baker, McGoohan,
Herbert Lom, Sean Connery, Sid James and more.
Screens with Pedestrian Crossing
brit noir
SYDnEY FiLM FEStiVAL 2013
SFF.orG.Au
43